It’s no secret that we are living in a generation where the greatest amount of people have turned to freelance work since history began. Maybe it’s because we’ve got more people in the world, but generally speaking, it’s just a lot easier for the majority of creatives. Who wouldn’t want to? Being able to work as and when you like is something that a lot of us have down as a distant dream. The truth is, it’s achievable – but it’s not as easy as it seems.

Getting The Work Space You Need

You need to decide where you are going to be working from. Whether it’s a designated room in your home, a rented office or even your bed – it needs to a space where you can work efficiently. When you are self employed, you need to have the same sort of motivation that you had in your last employed place of work, if not a little bit more. Differentiating between a place where you can sit and relax and somewhere that you need to gear yourself up to work can be hard, especially if you are used to stepping into an office and cutting yourself off from relaxation time until you get home. This is why you need to get into a good state of mind when it comes to working from home and be able to really set aside a place to work efficiently from. If you know that you will put things off around the home and do need a different place to work from, hiring a room or an office could definitely be the way to go.

Battling The ‘Norm’

You need to steer clear of the freelance dream for quite a while – at least until you have fully established yourself and can stick to a routine. There is so much temptation to ditch everything and go for lunch out with friends, or maybe have a few drinks the night before you reach a deadline – just because you have the chance to do it at home – but it’s important to remember that it is work. This means that you can’t quite get away with doing things which you wouldn’t even dream of doing if you were employed by a business rather than yourself. It’s not practical, it’s not setting a good example for yourself (and yes, this is a time when you need to be a role-model for you and you only) and it will set you up to fail; there is no way that you will be able to make your wealth at home by thinking this way. Know when your working times are and stick to them religiously. Even if you have no work as such to do, there are so many other things that can be done; accounting, admin, sorting out emails or even just marketing yourself for more work. There is a never ending list of jobs that can be undertaken when you sit down and think about it. Take the time to note down everything that you know that you can do when work dries up and set your mind to that.

Switch Off Social Media

Unless you are using it specifically for work purposes, turn it off. Disable your push notifications on your smartphone and try to resist the urge to type the address of any social media platform into your URL bar. There is no need for any distractions, and that is just what they are; hours can be spent trawling through people that you barely know, only for you to lose motivation to do any work yourself and put it off until the next day – or forever. There is definitely a sense of addiction to social media currently, with the dopamine hormone being released each time we check it and see a like or new notification. If you wouldn’t be allowed to check your phone in a workplace where you are employed by somebody else, stop checking it in your own work time. These rules are put in place for a reason, and we would do better to take on such rules from big companies and utilize them for our own advantage rather than defying them and doing differently. There are times when it is needed; if you are specifically an internet marketer or are a social media manager, then you can’t avoid it. For pretty much every other job out there, it is a nuisance and something that needs nipping in the bud before it starts to take over.

Apart from that, it’s your own drive which will determine just how much you will be able to make your home your workplace. Set yourself targets each day and try your best to beat them.